Does anyone have recommendations on how to overcome the resentment I feel against people like the author? I am jealous and frustrated by their advantage, but that opinion is purely negative and doesn't help me at all.
My teeth are horrible. A combination of genetics and an adolescence/pre-college diet of soda, I'd imagine. We're talking trips to the dentist every month or two for fillings, replacing fillings, the odd root canal here and there.
This year was the first year I've ever "used up" all of my dental insurance. Let's count my blessings, first of all: Holy shit am I lucky to have a world class dentist a few blocks away. Holy shit am I lucky to even have dental insurance at all, provided by my employer.
I recently scheduled a root canal for a tooth that's been causing tremendous pain. Crippling, anything touches the tooth and I black out for a couple seconds, creeping into a constant stabbing headache, barely kept under control by OTC pain meds, kind of pain. Without dental insurance, it'll be $600. Can I afford to do this every month? Heck no, this will be the last time I go to the dentist until insurance comes back in 2019.
But how fortunate am I that I can afford to pay for this once? Imagine being told it would cost even a few hundred at a cheaper dentist, you don't have insurance, and you're already counting dollars to make ends meet. Imagine being born in a third world country and you've got this problem; at best you'd just pull the tooth, which is going to create more problems, hopefully better problems.
During one dental procedure in the past I was prescribed Vicodin, 30 pills. I went to the pharmacist; that'll be $3 with insurance. What?!
Pain is a universal human feeling that, if you take a moment, offers an amazing moment of reflection and humility about how lucky most of us are that it's temporary. If you have chronic migraines, or joint pain, or diabetes, or anything like that: it affects everything you can do in life. You can't think clearly. You can't work as hard as your potential. This impacts all the future earnings you'll ever earn.
If you're generally healthy, generally pain free, and have access to healthcare when you're not, you're literally among the luckiest people on the planet.
That you're posting this is excellent and admirable.
I personally take two approaches when I feel any kind of resentment toward people who seem to have enormous and/or unfair advantages.
I first consider my own objective advantages. Instead of being born into a solid middle class home in Southern California a few decades ago, I could have been born in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Yemen recently, or almost anywhere in the world more than a century ago.
That I am here posting on Hacker News puts me in the (at least) top 1% most fortunate humans who have ever lived.
There isn't a trick. Resentment is what you feel when you kill yourself over a lifetime to achieve what someone else has given to them. All I can offer is "don't think about it to much".
disclaimer: Just as resentful as you are. I paid for college by enlisting in the military. Glad I could do my little part to keep the country safer for people like her...see? There is that resentment coming on again, it's such a tricky bastard of a feeling.
> Does anyone have recommendations on how to overcome the resentment I feel against people like the author? I am jealous and frustrated by their advantage, but that opinion is purely negative and doesn't help me at all.
I grew up with a number of people who were far more well off than me. One kid made more interest on his inheritance -most of it hadn't even arrived yet- than my parents made all year.
There's pros and cons. The pros you know about. Skiing holidays, expensive cars, everything you can point your finger at.
The cons are a bit more subtle. The feeling of never being able to deserve anything. The feeling of not participating in the struggle of life, which every living creature other than a rich human kid has. Face it, it doesn't matter how yo do on that math test. Frustration when inevitably some kid you know without all the advantages does better than you.
Also concretely rich people are no happier than poor people, above some quite low limit. It's not like the rich kids I knew were much happier than the poor ones, they could be grumpy as well. In fact it seems to be the case that barely anything affects how happy people feel, as long as they've got more than a baseline.
So even if you somehow managed to swap financial situations with some silver spoon kid, chances are you'd not feel any better.
I think that the experiences diverge the most as adults actually. Kids don't have many responsibilities and most go to school. Minimum wage jobs as a teen can actually be fun. You're surrounded by coworkers your age and everyone slacks off. It's low pressure in the sense that you and your coworkers don't care about getting promoted or fired.
As adults, rich kids can choose fulfilling, fun careers (or none at all). The non-rich slave in unfulfilling, soul sucking jobs, constantly worrying about money and retirement.
It's not the cool toys or expensive experiences that make wealth attractive. It's the ability to not work a 9-5 job without the fear of starvation or poverty.
Maybe the resentment (not at her personally, but at the aggregate exploitation her class exacts on those beneath) is a legitimate feeling you should not overcome but instead express at the ballot box.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, last month, a year ago. Stop comparing yourself to others, remap comparing yourself against others to comparing yourself against your past self.
I'm not at all surprised that the only (at the time of this comment) response that isn't just "refocus your hate at something else" is the one that's down-voted
Compare yourself to people who you are much more advantaged than? For example, were you born in the United States, or Western Europe? If so, you already probably had a lot of advantages compared to someone in say, Sudan. Did you grow up with parents, especially ones that cared about you and tried to help you improve your life? Lots of people don't have that.
The trick is to look down sometimes too, you're probably more fortunate than some people, should they resent you for it? (the answer could be yes, in which case your resentment is perfectly reasonable, but so is someone else's resentment of you)
Imagine alien algae start evolving on a barren rock in a remote planet. Some algae start out closer to water (better geographical location than others). These are the children of those lucky algae. That's basically it.
The solution is to develop a perspective into which you can integrate these kinds of phenomena.
Mine is basically... The world is decidedly unfair. Even though some people, e.g. trust fund kids, are dealt pocket aces at birth, you can't be angered because you'd be grateful it if happened to you. However, being in this class comes with obligations. These people should be aware of this obligation and they should be striving to produce great things with their means. If they don't, then they don't deserve their advantages, they should illicit frustration, and they should be maligned.
As someone who has the advantages described but was born in a third world country—I have a perspective that is hard to mesh with other people's opinion of my advantages. Fascinatingly—I've had my own set of difficulties that led to depression and suicidal thoughts. Many of them are family issues. The spectrum of possibilities for feeling fulfilled among humans is just fantastic. Not sure if I have good advice for dealing with the resentment—but the people who helped me get out of the depression were people who could show me that money didn't mean everything. Pretty much all of them came from a lot less. One of them was an orphan from the same third-world country. Who had her brother die in her 20's. And who died from cancer in her 30's. All the best in your journey! Reach out if you'd like. This is something I'd love to understand ever more deeply because I want to teach people to see me for who I am and finding that one thing that really means "Equality of Opportunity" if we can really achieve that.
Gratitude for the things you do have and remembering how fleeting all of it is.
We all die the same in the end, so what really matters?
Jesus said:
“Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
16 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. 17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
18 “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’
20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
21 “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God
What matters are the outputs and not the inputs. The author has all of these resources, but her output is frankly disappointing. You could accomplish more in 6 months than she has in her career if you truly dedicated yourself to the craft. Persistence and dedication still matter more than money.
Probably because I'm older, I am envious of the parents to be able to do this. I have kids getting ready for college. Thankfully they are getting academic scholarships. But to be able to write off the entire schooling and basically set them up for life...that I envy.
I take solace in the fact that I would do the same for my kids if I could. In fact giving your own kids the best possible advantage is such a basic human instinct that I don't think we can ever successfully structure a society to prevent it.
The best I can tell you is - embrace your anger and try to channel it towards something productive for yourself.
Be reasonably selfish and busy, and it brings you too many negative emotions, simply ignore it. There are way too many rich people lacking self-awareness to get angry about.
I struggle with the same thing, but I am getting over it. I try to do a better job of being extra proud of myself and my accomplishments. I frame my self-praise with something like 'Look where you started compared to your peers; and now look how far you made it!'
